Having just heard a piece by Bill Radke, on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday,” about “Puff the Magic Dragon,” I’m remembering my own childhood experience with the song. Radke says he remembers sitting in his parents’ living room around 1972, in front of the wood-paneled stereo, listening to this devastatingly sad song about a dragon who falls apart after his lifelong friend, Jackie Paper, abandons him. Whose idea was it to expose children to something this tragic? Give me a break: after Puff finds himself alone in life, green scales fall like rain, and the dragon slinks into his cave to cease his mighty roar. Actually, it’s not even tragic; Puff has no hubris or any identifiable tragic flaw. He is a deeply good creature abandoned by his best friend simply because the latter grows up; it’s just terrifyingly sad. Radke says he was a troubled child who lived very much in his imagination, and this song taught him that his own imagination could betray him with its own productions of pain and grief.
I have to say that I had quite a similar experience. As far as I could tell, Puff was irreparably damaged and utterly alone for the rest of his life. Growing up, I was very much a habitue of Captain Kangaroo’s Treasure House–the old one, not the newfangled one that appeared somewhere near the end of the show’s long run (I’ve always been kind of old school)–and they had a recurring piece devoted to the song, featuring illustrations appearing on Magic Drawing Board. As the song was ending, it was somewhat comforting to see, after the annoucement that Jackie Paper came no more, an illustration of a new little boy knocking on the door of the dragon’s cave. But eventually I realized that this new little boy was a lie, for there was no basis whatsoever for him in the lyrics of the song. I was devastated all over again.
As it happens, an earlier draft of the song did in fact have a new little boy show up. In his Weekend edition peice, Bill Radke, having recalled the terrible pain of this song in his childhood, decided that he had to seek out–and I quote–the “son-of-a-bitch” who wrote it. The “son-of-a-bitch” turned out to be Lenny Lipton (a very nice guy, as Radke discovered), who, inspired by an Ogden Nash poem, wrote a response poem about “Puff the Magic Dragon” when he (Lipton, not Puff) was a freshman at Cornell. He showed it to fellow Cornell student Peter Yarrow, who would later form a band with Paul and Mary. As co-writer of the song version, Yarrow struck out the final line, which has Puff in his cave awaiting the arrival of his new friend Jackie Knave.
So why did Peter Yarrow decide to revise the song this way, resulting in the irreparable damage of whole generations of American children? Lipton defends the song as it is. It’s practice grief, he says, so that one is prepared when one’s first love decides to break up etc. The co-host of Weekend Edition Saturday, Desiree Cooper, agrees. She was reminded of such practice grief when she gave her daughter Charlotte’s Web (one of her own favorite childhood books), and then later heard her daughter upstairs weeping. Cooper started to run upstairs to see what was wrong until she remembered that Charlotte dies at the end. The great theologian Karl Rahner writes in his book of meditations Encounters with Silence that all the people he loves who have died become in his memory like bodies he is dragging around with him all the time. One sign of a great theologian is such unflinching honesty about the difficulties of human life. Dragging these bodies of memory around with us is indeed hard work, so I think that it’s true we need practice grief to be prepared.
I suspect there is more to the work of such early experiences of literary heartbreak. I think G. K. Chesterton says somewhere that children do not learn from fairy tales that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales teach children that dragons can be killed. Of course, Puff–sensitive soul and friend of children–is no dragon to be killed. If I may adapt the Chesterton line: Sad songs do not teach children about loss and grief. Children already know about loss and grief. Sad songs teach children that loss and grief can be endured.